As Ireland’s Boom Ends, Job Seekers Revive a Well-Worn Path to New York

He came to the United States in 1996 to paint houses and work in construction. Like many of his fellow Irishmen, he returned home soon after to ride the Celtic Tiger, the economic boom that turned his once-struggling country into one of Europe’s great success stories and allowed him to start a construction company.

But now Niall, 34, is nursing a midday beer in an Irish pub in the Bronx, out of work and hoping to find any job at all.

“I’ll do anything,” he says, “from shoeing a horse to capping a chimney.”

The Irish, it appears, are coming to America again. Niall, who asked that his last name not be published because he intended to work illegally, is part of a fresh surge of immigrants who in recent months have fled Ireland as it suffered a sudden economic reversal. They have traveled here in search of employment, like generations of Irish before them and, in some cases, like their own younger selves.

Many have been making their way to the Bronx and Queens neighborhoods that became popular with the Irish who arrived in the last big wave of immigration, in the 1980s and ’90s, before Ireland’s prosperity slowed the influx and drew many home.

“I couldn’t sit around any longer doing nothing,” said Niall, just nine days off the plane from Dublin. In spite of rising unemployment in the United States, he and other newcomers say the job market here seems rosy compared with the meager offerings in Ireland, where the jobless rate has soared to nearly 12 percent. “It still seems that if you push yourself enough,” he said, “then you will find something.”

It is impossible to know the size of the latest Irish migration because many of the immigrants, like Niall, are arriving on tourist visas and planning to stay and work illegally.

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Orla Kelleher said twice as many Irish immigrants were seeking help from her organization, in Yonkers, than did a year ago.Credit
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

But Irish-American business owners, officials at the city’s construction unions and workers at advocacy centers that cater to Irish immigrants say they have seen a sharp increase in the number of new arrivals seeking jobs and other help. Landlords in heavily Irish neighborhoods report that applications for rental apartments have jumped this year, and Irish pubs and restaurants seem busier than they were a few months ago.

From his perch as the founder of The Irish Voice, a weekly newspaper published in New York, Niall O’Dowd has had a good view of what he calls the Irish “ebb and flow” over the past few decades. He sees the latest uptick reflected in the paper, which in recent months has been selling out at newsstands a day earlier than normal — probably, he theorizes, because newcomers are scrambling for classified advertisements to find jobs and housing.

“It’s part of the inherent genetic makeup of the Irish people that they leave at various times, when times are rough,” Mr. O’Dowd said. “It’s like an admission of defeat, in a unique Irish way.”

For some, the diaspora feels more like a homecoming. The close-knit quality of New York’s Irish neighborhoods makes the transition less trying, several recent immigrants said.

“It was very nice to come back to the Irish community,” said Conor, 27, who arrived in New York several weeks ago after finding no employment in Australia, where many out-of-work Irish have migrated in recent months. He, too, did not want his last name published because he feared detection by the immigration authorities.

Four years ago, Conor worked in New York on a special temporary visa given to recent college graduates. This time he arrived on a tourist visa, and through connections he made playing Gaelic football, he quickly found a construction job and an apartment in southeastern Yonkers, one of several Irish enclaves in the area, like Woodside, Sunnyside and Maspeth in Queens.

Conversations on the sidewalks of his neighborhood and adjoining Woodlawn, in the Bronx, are flavored with brogues from all regions of Ireland. Stores with green awnings sell Irish gifts and crafts, Irish coffee and specialty food from Ireland. And the national predilection for a good pint is evident, with pubs cheek by jowl along McLean and Katonah Avenues, the main commercial boulevards.

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Ciaran Staunton said four or five Irish were looking for work each day at his pub, O'Neill's, in Manhattan.Credit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

“It’s nice to have some familiar traditions you’re used to at home,” Conor said.

But not everyone has found it easy to get work. The competition is fierce, not only from other newly arriving Irish, but also from Americans freshly out of work.

Ciaran Staunton, an advocate for changes to immigration rules for the Irish and the owner of O’Neill’s, a pub in Midtown Manhattan, said that a year ago about one Irish immigrant walked into his bar each week looking for work. Now he is seeing four or five a day.

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Orla Kelleher, the executive director of a center in Yonkers that helps Irish immigrants find lodging and work, said the center had received inquiries from an average of about 10 newly arrived Irish per week during the past several months, double the number during the same period last year. But she acknowledged that they represented a tiny fraction of the new immigrant population.

Ms. Kelleher said the biggest change among the newcomers helped by her organization, the Aisling Irish Community Center, was how long they intended to stay. “Most are saying, ‘Depends on work’ or ‘As long as I can stay,’ ” she said. “Before it was kind of like, ‘Maybe three months.’ It was their call, it was their choice, whereas now they don’t have a choice.”

Another change, she said, is the large number of men who have left their wives and children in Ireland to find work in New York. “The probability is that they have a beautiful four- or five-bedroom house back in Ireland, and that’s probably strangling them now,” she said.

For Niall, the return to the United States was bittersweet. He first came to the United States fresh out of secondary school, with several friends, to work seasonal jobs in Boston and on Martha’s Vineyard. They moved back to Ireland the following year, 1997, to cash in on the soaring economy.

In Dublin, Niall said, he started a construction company that eventually grossed more than $1 million a year. He married and had a daughter. “We got a good nine years out of it,” he said.

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People looking for work are snapping up Niall ODowds newspaper, The Irish Voice.Credit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

But last year, as Ireland’s boom went bust, his business dried up. He was forced to lay off his employees, sell his company’s assets and sign up for jobless benefits. “I went from employing 22 guys to not even being able to get a job myself,” he said. “Overnight!”

After being mostly unemployed for a year, accumulating a tax debt of more than $100,000 and having his marriage end in divorce, he decided to try his luck in the United States. He settled on New York because he knew many people here and understood how to navigate the job market. And New York was a relatively short flight from home.

“You always go to where the Irish are,” he said, “because who else are you going to depend on to get your foot on the ladder?”

Since his arrival, he has slept on the couch of an Irish friend in Woodlawn. He has called all his Irish contacts in search of employment and answered help-wanted ads on Craigslist.

He landed a job working on a construction crew for a fellow Irishman. But he was getting paid only $100 for a 12-hour day without rest breaks. “I didn’t come here to get exploited by the Irish,” he said. “I’d be better off going home.”

He quit after a few miserable days and signed up to drive a pedicab in Manhattan. His longing to see his 6-year-old daughter has become crushing, he said, but he said he was determined to continue scraping for odd jobs in the hope that something more solid would come along.

He has vowed to give it a year.

“If something doesn’t happen by then,” he said, “I’m either doing something very wrong or there’s just nothing out there, and I wouldn’t be bothered to try anymore.”

In the meantime, he said, the alternative — returning to Ireland — is not in the cards. “There’s no reason to go back,” he said. “It’s pure catastrophe.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: As Ireland’s Boom Ends, Job Seekers Revive a Well-Worn Path to New York. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe